Trump spent a grand total of $600 million in his bid for the White House, according to official FEC reports, much lower than the estimated $1.2 billion former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised and spent in her massive attempt to win.

Trump spent $94 million of that during the final month of the campaign, smaller than the nearly $132 million Clinton spent on just ad buys nationwide. Clinton’s last-minute spending push left her with only $800,000 in the campaign spending account — meaning she spent most of the money raised.

So all the hand-wringers pissing and moaning about The Effect Of Money On Politics can just STFU.

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about the left is what I’d call “Sh*t sentimentality” and a crazy desire for the past. Growing up, they made me read jobs about how bad some jobs were: cleaning lady, assembly line, miner, server. BUT now they’re wailing that those jobs will vanish.

There are two keys to this: first, they are truly contemptuous of their fellow men. The modern leftist is not a worker, nor a man of the people, he is an intellectual, someone who did very well in the indoctrination factories we call schools. This encourages him to think anyone who doesn’t think like him is stupid, but more importantly, it encourages him to think anyone who doesn’t do well and mind-and-pen tasks is stupid. I know. I would have succumbed to that temptation if I hadn’t grown up in a village, where there weren’t enough people to insulate me from contact with people in manual professions who, sure, thought I was nuts reading as much as I did, but who could think faster and better than I in non-intellectual/abstract subjects.

And the second is that the left, thinking they’re smarter, think they have an obligation to “look after” the less intellectually fortunate. Which is why they are all bent out of shape about these sh*t jobs disappearing. I mean, yeah, they suck, but how can the left/bureaucrats come up with new jobs to replace the lost ones? How will they look after the unemployed? And how can we not care that technology is killing jobs???? How can we not want to beef up the welfare state to look after these poor people too stupid to do anything else? We’re monsters, I tell you, monsters.

And, oh, the fun things you’ll find in that pantry! On this shelf, lurking behind the powdered sugar, a weaponized chunk of brown sugar! Yes, yes, I know there’s household hints on how to soften it again, but I’d rather just go ahead and spend that $1.29 to replace it and read a good book. I may keep the bag in my nightstand next to my .45 as something I can throw if I run through all the cartridges in my four magazines. (Plus one in the chamber.)

Also found in the pantry are several small cans of beets, expired for just two years, that were purchased because they were supposed to be good for some darn thing or other I read about somewhere. Nobody in my entire social circle will eat beets. Even my farm girl bestie, Angela, insists that “beets taste like dirt,” though I have never asked her how she knows that. The Paranoid Texan Next Door has MILK that is more than two years old, but, call me crazy, I threw the beets out.

Over here are several varieties of stale crackers in opened boxes that SOMEBODY – I’m not going to mention any names here, but his initials are Mr. AG – failed to seal up properly. It is hard to keep crackers fresh when the boxes look like they have been broken into by some very impatient, ravenous raccoon and the little tab will therefore no longer fit into the slot.

If you’re like me — and let’s face it, you are, in more ways than you care to admit — you live your life by one simple precept. One thought, over and over, that helps you navigate through your day: What would Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. do?

I don’t have to tell you that you failed to ask yourself that question on Nov. 8, America. And Joe is very disappointed in you.

Compare the treatment of Joe Biden in the DemLegHump Media (fawning indulgence) with that received by Dan Quayle (savage scorn and ridicule). Note that Joe Biden said ten times the number of Stupid Things than Dan Quayle is reputed to have said.

Marvel at the current search for Fake News by the primary purveyors of it in the modern world.

About 10 “Keep It In The Ground” activists waved signs next to a busy road in the Denver area, calling for the Obama administration to stop issuing leases so companies can drill on public lands. Activists say drilling only exacerbates global warming.

The irony, however, is activists stood outside about 4 inches of snow with temperatures hovering in the 20s — in degrees Fahrenheit. The official low temperature was negative 10 degrees early Thursday morning, according to the National Weather Service.

Enviro-Nazis, of course, say that local weather doesn’t disprove their Globalclimate Warmingchange position, conveniently ignoring their own predilection to cite local hot weather in their own support.

This phenomenon is called the “Gore effect” — coined after a global warming rally held by former Vice President Al Gore in 2004 was met with frigid weather. A similar rally held by Gore in 2006 in Australia was also hit by cold weather.

It’s not just Gore who’s held freezing global warming rallies. Yale anti-fossil fuel campaigners postponed a protest in early 2015 due to “unfavorable weather conditions and other logistical issues.” New Haven witnessed a negative 9 degrees when the event was canceled.

This cold snap was suspiciously close the the trip AlGore made to visit the Trumps only days previously.

Ethnicity is central to China’s national identity. It is the Han, 1.2bn of them in mainland China alone, that most people refer to as “Chinese”, rather than the country’s minorities, numbering 110m people. Ethnicity and nationality have become almost interchangeable for China’s Han, says James Leibold of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. That conflation is of fundamental importance. It defines the relations between the Han and other ethnic groups. By narrowing its legal labour market almost entirely to people of Han descent, ethnicity is shaping the country’s economy and development. And it strains foreign relations, too. Even ethnic Han whose families left for other countries generations ago are often regarded as part of a coherent national group, both by China’s government and people.

Waiting for the Social Justice Warriors to take an a REAL raaaaaaacist society — Red China.

Since the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United States has carried a disproportionate share of the burden for defending the West. Indeed, today, in addition to America, only four allies meet the 2 percent of GDP NATO defense spending requirement: the United Kingdom, Poland, Greece and Estonia.

…

Enter candidate Donald Trump. From March 21 to March 29, 2016, Trump made his feelings about NATO members’ failure to live up to their defense spending obligations abundantly clear. In the Washington Post, he stated: “NATO is costing us a fortune and yes, we’re protecting Europe but we’re spending a lot of money. Number 1, I think the distribution of costs has to be changed.” He told the New York Times, “NATO is unfair, economically, to us, to the United States. Because it really helps them more so than the United States, and we pay a disproportionate share.” On the Charlie Sykes radio show, Trump escalated the rhetoric: “We are getting ripped off by every country in NATO.” Then, at a rally outside Milwaukee, he laid out the consequences of continued allied inaction: “Either they have to pay up for past deficiencies or they have to get out.”

Trump’s comments on NATO were criticized by his Republican competitors, and Hillary Clinton brought up Trump’s NATO views repeatedly in the presidential debates. Trump was accused of undermining the NATO alliance and causing our allies to lose confidence in America’s commitment to them. But something amazing started happening: America’s allies began pledging to increase their defense budgets. For example, on October 15, Germany said that it was going to spend €1.5 billion on five new corvettes to patrol the Baltic Sea, and that the ships would be dedicated to NATO missions.

At an extraordinary meeting of the normally staid State Lands Commission on Tuesday, a series of lawyers, local residents and surfers lined up to encourage the commissioners to follow their staff’s recommendation and use the extraordinary power of eminent domain to force Vinod Khosla to sell a parcel of land that covers the only entrance to Martins beach in San Mateo county.

The Sun Microsystems cofounder, who is worth $1.5bn, bought a 90-acre plot of land alongside the popular surfing spot in 2008 for $32.5m before closing public access in 2010. It has been tied up in legal disputes ever since.

Despite the state of California passing a specific law designed to force Khosla to open up access or sell the relevant piece of land (and bypass his novel legal strategy), he has refused to back down during two years of negotiations and talks have gone nowhere. That finally led the commission’s staff to make the extraordinary recommendation to the commission that it use its power to force a compulsory purchase. If voted on, it would be the first time in 78 years of existence that the commission would have done so.

But after 90 minutes of testimony and nearly an hour in closed session, the commissioners backed down and instead asked staff to “report back on the specific steps and process elements associated with the condemnation.”

In Hillary Country, he who has the gold makes the rules. Democrats talk a good fight about ‘power to the people’, but when the chips are down the guy who has the chips gets his way.

The city of Port Angeles, Washington spent $107,516 putting up wind turbines in a new city park. The turbines will power 31 lights in the park. This will save the taxpayers of Port Angeles a whopping $41.58 per month.

That’s before subtracting operating costs, though no one yet knows how much it will cost to operate them. The city is in a dispute with the manufacturer, so it will be another month or so before they turn them on.

Washington state is the northern province of Left Coast Ecotopia, so it’s a glaring example of politically-motivated ‘environmentalism’ that underscores the Thatcher proverb ‘the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money’.

Texas spends $275 million a year on a vehicle inspection program and has never bothered to find out if it makes the public safer or healthier.

The Lone Star State isn’t alone. None of the other 14 states with vehicle safety inspections could provide the Government Accountability Office with any evidence justifying the existence of the programs.

Nobody is in charge at the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) Board of Governors after today when the last Senate-confirmed governor’s term expires, leaving Postmaster General Megan Brennan and Deputy Postmaster Ronald Stroman large and in charge, with no oversight.

Not that ‘oversight’ of the Post Office ever did anybody any good. There’s a reason the Post Office has entered American folklore as the poster child for bureaucracy, inefficiency, and incompetence.

The number of governors on the postal board has dwindled as nobody has been appointed to new terms since 2010. Former Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has blocked multiple presidential appointments to the board, according to outgoing governor James Bilbray, a former Democratic congressman from Nevada. Meanwhile, the USPS’s deficit reached $5.6 billion this year.

This is the first I’ve ever heard of Bernie objecting to people being employed by the government. I doubt that the USPS’s deficit bothered him a microsecond.

The net impact of solar panels has actually increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions due to how much energy is used in their construction, a new study by Utrecht University concluded.

Researchers looked at 40 years of CO2 emissions from solar panels, including those caused by their production, then subtracted that by the amount of CO2 they prevented from being emitted. They found many older solar panels would take decades to lead to a net emissions reduction, which is far longer than their expected lifespan. They also concluded that the current generations of panels will probably only just reduce net emissions over years.

Pruitt, a Republican, has been critical of EPA regulations and led legal challenges against the agency’s two most contentious rules: the Clean Power Plan and the Clean Water Rule. Reuters reports Pruitt will head the agency he’s fighting in court.

Pistols and shotguns hung frozen in the air, their blunt ends aimed at various persons, who remained as still as, well, mannequins. One man was prostrate under the back of a car, as if for cover, the barrel of his shotgun peeking out. Another hid behind a plastic trashcan, flimsy protection if this were a real battle.

Gee, they all appear to be black. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

It was a version, albeit an edgy and ultimately inadvisable one, of the mannequin challenge – that Internet craze of filming a scene of stark-still people, generally with the song ‘Black Beatles’ by Rae Sremmurd playing over it. It has become so popular that everyone from Taylor Swift to NFL players to Alabama inmates have recorded a version.

The liberals are truly going nuts, and it’s beautiful. They recently resurrected Nancy Pelosi for another glorious term winnowing away the House Democrat caucus. Pretty soon it’s just going to be her and some guy representing Berkeley who they recruited while he was shouting “Workers of the world unite!” at bored coeds on Telegraph Avenue. You know, if you want to reach out to the kind of hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, normal Americans who voted for the black guy then allegedly refused to vote for the woman because they are racist, you totally want an ancient, rich, snooty, San Francisco leftist and Botox after-picture like the Nanster.

I forget who said that the Democrat party is a conspiracy of the Upper Class and the Lower Class against the Middle Class, but he ought to get a medal.

It can’t be that this is a mass delusion, Mark. It’s not that you’re being conned by people with a political and financial interest in manipulating your emotions. This really is the most important crisis of our time. It really is just like World War II. And you’re proving them right by walking across the country. Barefoot. It all makes sense.

Must be nice to have nothing better to do with your life.

As for how this American hero is financing his months-long journey, he says he “won a poetry fellowship for the state of Rhode Island.” So this story is pretty much perfect.

Glad I don’t live in Rhode Island and see my hard-earned money wasted on drones like this one.

Trump’s victory was largely minted in the suburbs and smaller cities of the new American Heartland, from Pittsburgh to Omaha to Dallas-Ft. Worth. The heartland regions depend on agriculture, home construction, manufacturing and energy, all of which could benefit from the policies of the new presidential administration and Republican Congress. In contrast, Hillary Clinton favored extending the Obama administration’s policies on fossil fuels and housing that may win support in the dense progressive bastions of the East and West coasts, but were viewed with alarm by many tied to heartland industries, some of which have been under pressure from a global decline in commodity prices.

Whether or not Trump can or should attempt to reverse the decline in manufacturing jobs is not the big story here. He can’t. The real story is that he continues to tap into the anger of his voters about being left behind. That will give him much more power than our criticisms will take away.

Politicians, aided by economists, have long ignored the negative impacts of trade-induced structural change. Indeed, they have even cheered it on. After all, the process “releases resources” for use in other, more productive parts of the economy. Those workers are just “low-skilled” workers. The US needs more “high-skilled” workers anyway.

Fact: Workers hate being referred to as “low-skilled.”

How we respond to Trump is important. If we simply fall back on our standard numbers, we lose. If we confidently predict that TPP is a big win because it will add 0.5% to GDP by 2030, we lose. If we just use this as an opportunity to reiterate the importance of a college degree, we lose. We have been doing this for decades, and it helped deliver Trump to office.

…

We don’t have answers for these communities. Rural and semi-rural economic development is hard. Those regions have received only negative shocks for decades; the positive shocks have accrued to the urban regions. Of course, Trump doesn’t have any answers either. But he at least pretends to care.

Just pretending to care is important. At a minimum, the electoral map makes it important.

A Reddit that asked people who had met Trump before he ran for President what he was ‘really’ like.

A typical comment:

I went to school with his daughter Tiffany so I had a few interactions with the Donald and all were positive. The one anecdote that I’ll share is from the school plays. Tiffany was involved in the school theatre program and so was my brother so I was usually helping out as an usher for the plays. Donald attended all the plays that were put on despite living across the country from our school in LA. The thing that was most impressive was how here arrived to the plays, he was always late, just 1 minute late. He’d arrive and take his seat in the rear just after the house lights went down so he didn’t draw any attention away from the kids. He’d slip out as quietly as he’d arrived, when he was at the school his focus was 100% on his daughter and not himself. Despite living in a pretty solid liberal area most people from that school admit that’s it kind of hard to square our experiences with him up with the media’s portrayal of him as a brash, egotistical idiot.

Jordan, who has repeatedly called for Koskinen’s impeachment, said the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS is unacceptable. He said Koskinen’s role in the scandal warrants impeachment proceedings.

The employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act requires businesses with more than 50 full-time employees must provide health care for at least 95 percent of the employees and dependents up to age 26, or pay a fee.

Katz told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that that between his two restaurants in Fort Worth and Dallas, he has more than 50 employees. Because he doesn’t provide health care to his staff, starting Jan. 1, he will face a penalty between $200,000 and $300,000.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” Katz told the Star-Telegram. “Instead of 50 or 60 people without healthcare, we have 50 or 60 people that aren’t employed anymore. It makes no sense.”

“Farmers, ranchers and growers the world over are transitioning to precision agricultural methods,” Tobe told EE Times in advance of his exclusive report on agricultural robots, “Subdividing their acreage into many unique subplots—and in some cases right down to the individual plant, tree or animal—thereby enabling increased productivity, traceability and lower overall costs. Unmanned aerial vehicles are integral to the process and are being used to map, observe, sense and spray.”

Pretty soon there won’t be any rednecks for Obama to kick around any more.

A team of researchers from the US and Germany have now confirmed that the Wendelstein 7-X (W 7-X) stellerator is producing the super-strong, twisty, 3D magnetic fields that its design predicted, with “unprecedented accuracy”. The researchers found an error rate less than one in 100,000.

The death of primary care was a culmination of two fatal disorders. The first was a chronic, debilitating illness that systematically deprived the practice of primary care medicine of its very purpose and meaning. This illness took hold long ago, back when Mr. Obama was still organizing sundry communities, and Mr. Trump was still enthusiastic about the casino business. Consider the long-term effects of this illness. if you ask a primary care physician what their medical practice is like today, you are likely to get an answer like this:

“Our pay is determined arbitrarily by Acts of Congress, like workers in the old Soviet collectives. We are directed to “practice medicine” strictly according to directives (quaintly called “guidelines”), handed down from on high by panels of sanctioned experts, and accordingly we are enjoined from taking into account our professional experience, our intuition informed by judgment, or our specific knowledge of our individual patients when we advise them about their medical issues. We are strictly limited to 7.5 minutes per patient “encounter,” and the content of this brief encounter is determined by certain Pay for Performance checklists which have been given to us by yet other expert committees. These checklists assure that most of our 7.5 minute encounter is spent asking about important medical topics such as the storage of handguns in the home and sodium in the diet, for if we skip any items on the list we define ourselves as substandard caregivers. This expediency has had the effect of greatly limiting any discussion of topics or concerns that are not on the list, and thus do not meet the approved agenda. Our every move must be carefully tabulated according to incomprehensible rules, on innumerable computer forms and other documents, that confound patient care but that greatly further the convenience of the stone-witted bureaucrats and forensic accountants who are employed specifically to second-guess every clinical decision and every action we take.

A progressive non-profit suppressed evidence of anti-white hate crimes following Donald Trump’s presidential victory, apparently in favor of promoting a narrative that exclusively reported violence and racism by Trump supporters.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released the results of a survey on Nov. 28 that purports to find a “Trump Effect” in American schools. SPLC noted that, of the 10,000 teachers who responded to the survey, about 40 percent reported they had “heard derogatory language directed at students of color, Muslims, immigrants and people based on gender or sexual orientation.” Eighty percent reported heightened anxiety by “marginalized” students, and 90 percent said the election had a generally negative effect on students.

“Intersectionality” is the post-modern identity politics term of art for conflating the car crash of competing victimization categories. I think. Because in addition to oppressed women, minorities, and genderfluid people, it apparently also includes . . . chickens. Also cows.

You have to read the abstract to believe it. Sample sentence:

Such socio-spatial practices are the means through which men, women, chickens and cattle become privileged and/or othered within dominant gender–species hierarchical arrangements.

There’s a reason why Republicans soon will control not only the presidency, but also the Senate, the House, 33 governorships and both chambers in 32 states.

The reason can be found in the Dakota Access Pipeline case. With its elevation of identity politics above all else, its twisting of facts to accuse others of racism, its fanatic claim of being above the law and its wild exaggerations of environmental risk, the protest helps explain why so few Americans are willing to give the Left power.

The protesters won an important battle on Sunday, when their efforts convinced the Obama administration to block the pipeline. But it’s likely to be a Pyrrhic victory, not only because the Trump administration might reverse it, but also because it deepens the public’s distrust of modern liberals’ governance.

When Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún arrived in New Spain (Mexico) in 1529, he embarked on an extraordinary project: the compilation of an encyclopedic compendium of the world of the Aztecs in the wake of the Spanish conquest a decade earlier.

Finally completed between 1576 and 1577 – essentially Sahagún’s life’s work – the result was the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (the General History of the Things of New Spain). Sometime between 1578 and 1584 the manuscript was taken to Spain and by 1588 Sahagún’s Historia found its way to Florence, part of the Medici family’s magnificent collections. How exactly the Historia came into Medici hands remains unclear but that is where it still resides today, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which explains how the Historia became more commonly known as the Florentine Codex.